The Rise of Henry Morcar Read online

  Of course by that time some of the weavers had grown rich by weaving and become yeomen clothiers; they farmed several acres of land, ran three or four looms, dressed their own cloth, employed weavers and croppers and apprentices and paid them wages. Your own house, said David, Stanney Royd you know, is the home of a yeoman clothier. I should think your study and Mrs. Morcar’s bedroom were the loom-chamber.

  As a matter of fact, said David, the owner of Stanney Royd in the seventeenth century was quite a notable figure during the Civil War; he was a great Parliament man, you know—sent lots of money to support the Parliament’s army against King Charles, which was fighting then in Yorkshire. Some people say he was present at the siege of Bradford.

  Oh, that was in 1643, said David; the Royalists besieged Bradford, fired down the streets with cannon; the Puritans, clothiers and weavers chiefly, hung woolsacks on the church tower to protect the men defending it. I’ve seen an old print of the incident.

  Yes, it’s still the same church tower; you ought to look at it next time you go to Bradford.

  Yes, we’ve played our part in English history. Usually a stubborn, independent, freedom-loving part. We rebelled against William the Conqueror, under an earl of your name; we fought the tyranny of King Charles; we’re nonconformists, argumentative, hard-headed, practical, stiff-necked. As Charlotte Brontë said, we’re difficult to lead and impossible to drive. We’re stubborn folk, we West Riding clothiers.

  As you say, the Civil War upset the textile trade a bit, agreed David; they suffered strong blasts of adversity, as they put it in those days.

  You’re right; we’ve met with a good many blasts of adversity, one way or another, through the centuries; but we’ve survived, you see. We’ve adapted ourselves, given a new turn to our product, recovered our markets and prospered.

  Look at this Piece Hall; it’s one of the earliest. Our own Cloth Hall in Annotsfield came thirty years later. It was taken down in the 1890’s, you know; the Annotsfield Free Library is built on its site. All the Piece Halls and Cloth Halls in the West Riding were built in the eighteenth century. By that time the cloth trade was far too great for church walls and bridges to serve as markets.

  The Halls usually had a large central room for the market, with many small rooms where the manufacturers kept their cloths. The bargaining was conducted in whispers.

  Yes, the Yorkshire clothiers still sent cloth to London by pack-horse train to be sold there; they sent it overseas too—there are grumbles about missing the convoy, which go on for a couple of centuries.

  Old Sam Hill, who lived in this ruined house in this hilltop village where we are now standing, sold cloth all over Europe. Holland and Belgium and France of course, but even as far as Russia. Yes; uniforms for Russian soldiers. Have you never seen his letter-book? His pattern book? Oh, you should; let’s drive down to the museum and look at them. Sam was a tough hombre, said David, smiling, a real West Riding individualist; you should read his letters when the quality of wool and soap he bought didn’t quite please him. Vitriolic. He had a thirty-thousand pound annual turnover. Not bad for 1737. I should think he employed half a hundred weavers, who wove the yarn he provided on their own looms in their own homes, for wages. The Domestic System, you know; Defoe gives a marvellous description of it in his Tour through England. It was about that time the Scape Scar weavers, Bamforths, began to weave for my other ancestors for wages. This paper-backed folio gives a list of William Oldroyd’s “out-weavers” for 1759; there’s a Jonathan Bamforth and a Matthew Mellor amongst them.

  Heather! Come here, Heather! Come here, sir! Oh, well, we may as well go down the lane, since he’s so determined. Heather’s quite an historian; he knows all the sites of historical interest, he’s visited them with me so often. This one is really rather interesting. See the water-wheel? This is one of the first mills in the West Riding to run textile machinery by water-power. The use of water as power drew the textile industry from the hillsides to the valleys, where the streams were broader and stronger. It was the beginning of the Factory System.

  Oh, from 1790, 1800 or so onwards.

  Of course, my own mill, Old Syke Mill, was the first in the Ire Valley to run frames by power, said David.

  Didn’t you know that? Oh, yes; an ancestor of mine was murdered by his workpeople for introducing cropping-frames run by water-power. Shot. Just at the top of the lane. They took an oath and called themselves Luddites. They attacked other mills, too—quite a large-scale unrest. 1812. A horrible lot of hanging to finish with.

  The Industrial Revolution? Well, it depends whether you date it from water-power or from steam. First they invented textile machines to run by water-power, then they discovered the power of steam, then they harnessed the steam to the machines. My ancestors put a steam engine into Old Mill about 1817. Steam made the West Riding the seething smoke-blackened forest of mill chimneys it is to-day. Let’s hope electricity will take the smoke away again.

  This is John Wood’s house—you know, the manufacturer who supported Richard Oastler in his fight to free children from working long hours in the mills. In fact, said David, it was Wood who persuaded Oastler to take up the cause. They dined together one night when Oastler had been making an anti-slavery speech about the West Indies, and Wood told him there was slavery nearer home which needed attention. Yes, I’m sorry to say, children were working fourteen or fifteen hours a day, from seven or eight years old. They passed a Ten-Hour Bill eventually and put a stop to it. One of the earliest examples of industrial welfare legislation.

  This is the inn where the first weavers’ union was formed. My cousins’ grandfather was one of the founders, explained David. They called the first textile strike in 1883, you know. He’s my grandfather as well, you see. Yes, I’m pretty well mixed up with the West Riding textile industry—but then, we all are; I daresay if you investigated your own ancestry you’d find you were pretty much in the thick of it.

  “It often seems to me,” remarked David diffidently one day a few months later: “That we’re beginning another industrial revolution now. If so, I should like to take part in it.”

  “You mean we’re beginning to use another form of power-electricity?”

  “No. I mean the way the industry is run,” said David. “You’d probably think my ideas on the subject quite fantastic, but I should like to talk to you about them some time.”

  “I shall be glad to listen,” said Morcar truthfully.

  “Could you bear my cousins to be present at the discussion?”

  “Why not?” said Morcar staunchly, though with much less pleasure.

  30. Argument of the Century

  “Well, here we all are. I told my father you smoked cigars, Mr. Morcar, and he’s sent this box. I hope they’re all right.”

  “It’s very kind of Colonel Oldroyd,” said Morcar stiffly.

  “Cigarettes behind you, Matthew. Pipes for you and me, GB.”

  The four men were sitting in the Scape Scar loom-chamber; Morcar in a spindle-back chair by the hearth, the two Mellors on the settle, David sprawling on the oak chest by the windows. The hour was dusk, the time was the spring of 1937; the lights down the Ire Valley sparkled agreeably.

  “I shall now set the ball rolling and horrify all present,” continued David, “by stating my belief that Trades Unions and Employers’ Federations are a pair of horrible legacies from the nineteenth century. I say horrible advisedly. Bodies which exist to secure material advantages for themselves by imposing regulations on somebody else are in my opinion horrible. Trades Unions and Employers’ Federations both do that. I think an industry should be organised as a whole, with two objects. One: honourable service of the community by its products. Two: honourable living for all who produce the product.”

  “Well, my dear David,” said GB in his pleasant reasonable tone: “You can have your organisation any time you want, if only enough of you vote for the Labour Party. Nationalisation is the answer to your problem.”

  “You and
my father, GB, on opposite sides, can always be relied on to toe the party line.”

  “Russia,” began Matthew Mellor ardently.

  “Aye,” cried Morcar, interrupting him: “And without seeing what they’re toeing. Sorry,” he added hastily, with a glance at the Mellors: “But I understand we are to handle this problem with the gloves off.”

  “By all means,” agreed GB pleasantly. “Far better. The only way to any real progress. But come now, David, you know that Trades Unions were and are absolutely necessary to combat bad working conditions and secure proper rates of pay.”

  “Oh, I daresay,” agreed David. “In past and present times I agree they may have been necessary. But I’m talking about the future. Wars have been necessary sometimes in the past, but I don’t like them, I want to get rid of them. In the same way, I hate this tearing of the textile trade into halves.”

  “Well, you can blame capitalism for that,” said GB with a trace of acerbity.

  “Yes, that’s true. As soon as a man has to weave on another man’s loom the interests of the two are different. How are we going to get those two interests together again?”

  “He’s told you,” said Matthew in a loud peevish tone: “By nationalisation.”

  “It’s the only thing, David,” said GB. “You may as well admit it. I suppose your idea is some kind of Guild Socialism?” he added politely.

  “Guild Socialism has been tried once already in the textile trade,” said David.

  “When? Of course you’re much better informed about textile history than any of the rest of us,” said his cousin.

  “Oh, in York, in the middle ages,” said David. His tone was rueful as he went on: “Unfortunately it didn’t work—or rather, it worked too well. The innumerable regulations about payments, apprentices, numbers of looms, weights and dimensions of cloth and so on, kept the York clothiers too busy keeping them to make any cloth. The York trade just decayed and vanished, and the industry journeyed west, to the tough, hard-headed individualists of the West Riding.”

  “There you are, you see,” said Morcar, delighted. “That’s just what I’ve always said. Individual talent and enterprise are what make progress. Over-organisation kills. Your whole argument is vitiated by your own showing. And so is yours,” he added, turning to the Mellors.

  “If you look at Russia,” began Matthew, bristling angrily, while GB replied in his reasoning tone:

  “No The York failure is only one of the facts which have to be remembered. There are others, you know, Mr. Morcar, such as low wages and bad conditions. Surely everybody nowadays would rather never wear cloth again, for instance, if it involved the awful child labour of the early nineteenth century. If we can’t have a certain product without exploiting the worker, then we must give up the product.”

  “That’s understood,” said David.

  “Of course it’s understood,” said Morcar angrily. “I don’t want to exploit the workers, good heavens. I want to pay them a good wage for reasonable hours. But there comes a point when wages are so high and output so low that the price of my product is too high for the overseas market to pay. Then what happens?”

  “The industry as a whole should decide how to tackle that problem,” said David.

  “The State should decide it,” said Matthew.

  “Life or death, comfort or starvation, for the workers shouldn’t depend on a private person,” amplified his brother.

  “My own comfort has always depended on me,” threw in Morcar. “But the point is—”

  “Your life is fascinating, Mr. Morcar, but thoroughly antisocial,” GB told him with a smile.

  “I don’t see that,” said Morcar, colouring. “I’ve made these charming cloths which weren’t made in bulk before. Millions of people—not by any means necessarily rich people—wear them with pleasure. The price is lower because I’ve popularised them and given them a bigger sale. I pay proper wages and give employment to hundreds of workers.”

  “But it’s all done from the wrong motive,” smiled GB.

  “You must excuse me for thinking that a cloth trade is a trade to make cloth,” said Morcar, getting hot, partly with anger, partly with the unaccustomed effort to express himself on abstract subjects. “Now look,” he went on: “There’s just two things I want to make quite clear. The first one is this: About the profit motive. I don’t give a damn for the profit motive really.”

  “You don’t, Mr. Morcar!” exclaimed the younger Mellor, his brown eyes sparkling with polite and amused incredulity.

  “Tell me another!” invited Matthew with derision.

  “Of course I want to earn a decent living wage, the same as everybody else,” said Morcar. “I want to support my family, I want to be able to travel and do as I like. But I don’t really care about heaping up an immense fortune. If I had children of course, perhaps it might be different; I should want to give them the best that could be had—same as everybody else. But profit isn’t what I really work for—I do it for the fun of the thing.”

  “He means he’d be perfectly willing to run his business not for private profit,” explained David, “provided that——”

  “Provided I were free to run it as I liked,” said Morcar.

  “If public money and public interest are concerned, no one person can be free to run anything as he likes,” said GB, frowning disapprovingly.

  “That’s just what I’m saying,” argued Morcar. “All the fun goes in a controlled industry. I like there to be lots of separate units, doing as they like.”

  “I expect the Saxon thanes in the Heptarchy said that when Alfred the Great wanted to unite and organise England,” remarked GB.

  “I don’t know history as you do,” said Morcar impatiently. “I’m not a scholar, I haven’t had your advantages. But I do know the textile trade. I’ve worked in it since I was sixteen. I love wool, I love colours,” said Morcar, getting excited: “Designs are a real pleasure to me. And I love managing the finance and taking a bit of a risk, I love pulling off a good order. There’ll be no fun in industry if it’s all to be nationalised, regulated, if we can’t move a step without filling up five forms, if we can’t use our own originality and judgment. You can take the profit and I shan’t call out, but take the freedom and the fun’s all gone. Nay, if industry’s to be like that I shan’t be in it. I’d rather go to sea. And if you think you won’t miss me and my like, if we leave textiles, you’re wrong, for you will. Originality, individuality, that’s the mainspring of a trade like ours. I’ve got it. Will your nationalised manufacturers have it? I say they won’t, they can’t.”

  “There’s a good deal in what you say, Mr. Morcar,” said GB judicially: “But you have to remember that industry is what you describe with such horror, already, for your workmen. It’s regimented as far as they are concerned. They have no scope for originality, individuality, enterprise, in minding a machine.”

  “There’s not much fun in it for us!” supplemented Matthew emphatically.

  “Then there ought to be; they ought to enjoy output as much as I do.”

  “No, they can’t,” objected David.

  “Nathan does.”

  “It’s no use pretending that dull jobs aren’t dull,” said David.

  “Nationalising won’t make ’em any brighter.”

  “Yes, it will, because the motive for them will be different,” said GB.

  “Serving the State,” said Matthew, turning his round blue eyes resentfully on Morcar, “instead of a private employer.”

  “Besides, there’ll be a chance for the workers to rise to administrative positions. There isn’t now.”

  “I rose all the way by my own efforts.”

  “Not quite all the way,” said GB judicially. “You had a grammar school education and some small capital—or access to it.”

  “There are never many jobs at the top, think on. I’m not saying the universe is arranged perfectly,” said Morcar with a good deal of heat. “I’m just saying what I feel. Lively int
elligent chaps used to like to go into industry but now they don’t, they go into the professions if they can, because they’re so hampered in industry with these everlasting regulations.” It occurred to him that even the Mellors were an example of this; the lad with brains, GB, took scholarships and went to Oxford and would go off to teach or be a Trades Union official or something; Matthew was left to go into textiles because he wasn’t clever enough for anything else. “It’s a bit hard on the textile industry,” said Morcar with feeling, considering the pair on the settle. Fearing he had made his thoughts about them too clear, he went on rapidly: “And now for my second point. I’m sick and tired, and all employers are sick and tired, of always being the villain in the piece. Whatever the employer does nowadays is wrong. If he’s a bad employer, well naturally he’s blamed, but if he’s a good employer, he doesn’t get any credit. He’s accused of interfering with the workers’ private lives, trying to vitiate the principle of collective bargaining, make the workers betray their class, and all that sort of claptrap. The fact is, you Labour chaps don’t want good employers—you’d rather have bad ones that you can make a song and dance about. Tell us what you want employers to do. Go on, now. Tell me.”

  “We don’t want any private employers at all. We want industry to belong to the State. We want a classless society,” said Matthew tensely.

  “And where do I come in, eh? Men of my kind, I mean? The chaps with the ability and the enterprise?”

  “Nowhere!” cried Matthew in a high fierce tone, his upper lip quivering. “Such as you ought to be liquidated.”